He did not answer. He only stood on the dark red and blue Oriental rug, surrounded by the weighty gilt and polychrome Italian furniture, and ran his hands through his thick gray hair, disheveling it. He was very thin, and his broad shoulders drooped with chronic weariness. He dropped his hands, and they hung at his side, tremulous and twitching. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. His emaciated face glistened like a skull in the lamplight. He tried to smile. All the fierceness of his black eyes had vanished years ago, had been replaced with cinders. Only his bony and aquiline nose, larger now since his loss of flesh, still jutted arrogantly from the ruin of his face. It was, thought Cornelia, like the slender marker on a grave, which testified that here had once been a man. For an instant her own fine body sagged with the nearest thing to despair she had ever experienced. She went, with a rustle of silk and a waft of rich perfume, to Allan’s carved Italian desk and put her hand on the neat mound of papers. “You’ve had too much of a burden lately, my darling. But Papa is well enough again to take up considerable of it. I’m proud of you. All this today! When you are supposed to be enjoying yourself.”
“I never enjoy myself. I never did,” said Allan.
He’s in another of his moods, thought Cornelia with alarm. She made herself smile indulgently, and came close to him, her head tilted sideways. Before she could speak, the French valet entered discreetly. “Go away,” Allan commanded. “Come back in five minutes.”
Cornelia pointedly lifted the lid of her jewel-encrusted watch on her breast. “All right, Antoine. Just five minutes.” She sighed.
She waited, but Allan stood there in silence, forgetting her, distractedly rubbing at his head, staring at the floor. At thirty-nine, in the gentle lamplight, she appeared not to have acquired years. She wore a soft cream-colored gown of old silk and pale yellow lace caught tightly at the narrow waist with a stomacher of intricate gold and yellow canary diamonds and opalescent pearls. The stuff floated about her splendid figure like the garments of a goddess. Her throat gleamed with yellow diamonds and pearls, and there was no line on its smooth surface. The still violently red and springing hair stood above her forehead in a blazing pompadour, glittering here and there with diamond combs and pins. From her there exuded the indomitable vitality that could never be quenched by time, for it sprang from her spirit.
She carried a big fan of yellow ostrich plumes on her wrist, and she lifted it abstractedly and fanned herself for a moment as she studied Allan. The gaslight near which she stood flickered, then brightened, revealing her face vividly. Her face was tighter, more strongly chiseled than in youth, harder and more astute, cynical lines about a mouth which depended these last few years on paint rather than on young blood for its color, her cheeks rouged expertly but lacking their original roundness and the flare of natural tint. However, nothing could extinguish the power, the light, the indomitable passion of her character fully revealed in her eyes. Nothing but death would ever quiet or subdue them, or drain from them their bawdy gleam and strength.
Allan said, as if to himself, “Why do we have to go out?”
“Let’s not be disagreeable, dear,” replied Cornelia in a coaxing voice.
“You talk as if I were a child,” Allan answered, and his voice rose on a note she dreaded. He looked at her with a recurrence of his wildness, and the burned eyes became alive again momentarily. He reached out and seized her gloved hands and held them fiercely. “Cornelia, what are you? Who are you? Tell me!”
Oh, God, she thought hopelessly. Is it beginning again? She made herself answer tenderly, “Why, darling, I’m Cornelia deWitt Marshall, your wife. You’ve asked me that so often.”
He threw her hands from him. “But you’ve never answered me.” He sat down in one of the gilded monsters and averted his head.
Cornelia had become familiar with this sudden quiver about her heart, which annoyed her. She knelt before her husband and put her jeweled hand on the arm of the chair. She made herself smile widely, conscious of the inexorably ticking watch on her breast. “I have; over and over. But you’ve never listened, my dear. And coming down to it, and being a little metaphysical, which I loathe, how can anyone answer such questions, not knowing the answers?”
He listened with an alertness which gave her hope. He regarded her with sudden astonishment. He reached out timidly after a moment and touched her neck. He said, “Cornelia. I never knew you had such thoughts, that you. …” His feeble smile was pathetic, his eyes eager and seeking.
Damn, must I have another role, too, in addition to all the others I have taken on? thought Cornelia with amused ruefulness. Must I be yearning and significant and soulful, implying all sorts of weird spiritual nonsense?
Despite her impatience and secret amusement, and because she loved him with an amazing depth, she made her head droop. She sighed. She bit her lip theatrically. She forced her broad shoulders to sag. She was a picture of a beautiful and invincible woman undone by an assault on a hidden and sensitive spirit concealing itself beneath jewels and rouge and silk and feathers. “I am very proud, my dear,” she murmured. “I never believed it was fair to inflict one’s moods and uncertainties and fears on another, especially not on one you love.” She was repeating, verbatim, lines from a very emotional and flamboyant play she had seen in Paris, but which, fortunately, Allan had not attended.
Allan’s hands were on her shoulders now, desperately gripping, and she winced. She thought: I must stop this nonsense immediately, or I’m going to be in for endless years of soul-searching and soul-moods and soul-communion and other ridiculous things, and one of these days I won’t be able to keep from bursting out laughing right in his poor face. “Cornelia!” Allan cried. “You do understand.” He lapsed into rapid incoherence, the words stumbling from him. “All this time. You see, in the beginning, there was the illusion, or perhaps the reality. I had union with the work; it was something my hands could do, something my feet could stand in! There’s a story about the Titan who had to keep in touch with the earth or he’d lose his strength—his existence. Contact. You do see? Now it’s monstrous.” He paused for breath, strangled, and coughed, still holding her. She could feel the pulsing of his blood, frantic, struggling, as he fought for expression. “In the beginning, it was a thing I could handle, even when I first came in. But not now. It’s sucked away my identity. If we all died, tomorrow, it would go on, like a nightmare Frankenstein monster, clicking away, rolling, steaming, unaware we were dead. We aren’t needed, your father and I, or anyone else.”
As Cornelia was intelligent and shrewd, she had some awareness of what her husband meant, and she became thoughtful, looking up into his face. But the sense of power in her was only stimulated and made exultant by his words. And she also had her suspicions that this was not the whole story of his agony.
She had no need to pretend, for she was no longer amused. This was serious. She was convinced that subtle action at this moment might result in new health of mind for her husband, a lifting of the horror which was crushing him, and which existed only in his own imagination.
She took Allan’s face between her firm palms and looked into his eyes, “I said you were selfish, my dear, and I repeat it now. You are selfish. Most of us are incapable of expressing ourselves. But, out of decency, out of consideration, we hold our tongues, and try to make of living a smooth and pleasant surface so that life can be tolerable for all of us.”
He wound his fingers about her wrists and gazed at her with such naked despair, and with such an intense lostness, that she was shocked. She glanced away, almost ashamed. The fingers tightened about her wrists, and when she looked at him again she was even more ashamed. His face had changed; it had lightened with tenderness and compassion and with something that was like joy. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said, as if controlling some inner weeping. “I’ve been callous. I never understood you.”
She said quickly, “You can help me, and help yourself, by not speaking of this again.” She laughed a little. “We have others to consid
er, too.”
He bent his head and laid his cheek against hers with a gesture of hunger, and she forgot herself and held him tightly in her arms. One did not mock, unnecessarily, the pain of a child, no matter how a damned watch was ticking on and no matter how imminent a dinner hour. She loosened herself from Allan’s grasp, and rose, shaking out her silk and lace. He sat, looking up at her so tenderly that his expression, to her, was practically fatuous. “You are right, Cornelia,” he said, and there was new firmness in his voice. “I’ve been selfish; I never knew.”
Lightness, in this “understanding,” was now a necesary touch. But even while she began to smile, to speak, Allan’s valet, a small, rapid man, came into the room hastily, carrying a yellow envelope in his hand. He bowed to Cornelia, and said to Allan with excitement, “Monsieur! A cablegram! From America.”
Allan, bemused, took it. Cornelia said, “Business, no doubt. Don’t bother about it now. We are so late.”
But Allan, his hands no longer tremulous, the muscles of his face no longer twitching, was already tearing open the envelope. “But business is business,” he said, and he actually laughed. “Just a moment, Cornelia.”
Idly, she leaned against him to read. The cablegram was from Tony, their son. “Please return home at once. Doctors advise it. DeWitt has infantile paralysis. He is at Portersville with me. Paralyzed in right leg, very ill. Love.”
Cornelia uttered a sharp loud exclamation. Her first thought was: Papa. Her second: We shall miss Paris in the spring. It was only when Allan rose, his face ghastly, that she remembered that it was his son who had been stricken, his peculiar, unlovable, and unknowable son. And it was even later that she remembered that this was her son, also, possibly dying in Portersville.
The vesper bells had long ago died on the black sea, but Allan heard them again, a jangle, an imminence, a roar and a pounding in his ears. There was nothing else in his ears but the bells, and through them, piercing them, cried one agonized voice: “Lord, have mercy upon us—Lord, have mercy upon us—Christ, have mercy upon us—Christ, have mercy upon us—Lord, have mercy upon us. …”
37
Cornelia had acquired a good-humored tolerance and respect for the little fat monk who was her husband’s brother. She found herself, to her humorous surprise, actually confiding in him when they walked together through the graygreen April twilights, pausing now and then to admire the golden buds of the daffodils leaning against the cold spring wind or the red stars of the maples standing against the greenish sunset sky. Brother Michael was such a “quaint” person, his head hardly reaching to her shoulder. He was kind; he was understanding. He was gentle, and sometimes he joked and made her laugh. But more than anything else he emanated calm confidence and serenity and a kind of wry wisdom which Cornelia appreciated. Estelle might complain that their friends would consider his frequent presence very queer, and “truly, we have worked so hard not to let others know of Allan’s background; so Popish, so vulgar, so unacceptable.” Cornelia enjoyed Michael’s company, and Rufus frequently asked for him. There was an earthiness in father and daughter which responded to the earthiness of the little monk. To Allan’s amazement, there was even a kind of rapport between the three. He could not comprehend it.
Upon returning from Europe after twelve days of endless travel by rail and by ship, the family had found Michael assisting the nurses in the care of young DeWitt. Tony had quite simply informed them that he had asked his uncle to come. In the confusion of the homecoming, the consultations with a battery of physicians from New York and Baltimore, the comings and goings of teams of nurses, no one had thought to ask Tony why he had sent for this smiling, brownfaced monk, and why Michael had responded. It seemed quite natural to everyone, except Estelle and Jon and Norman, for him to be present. After all, was he not a species of nurse, himself? He came each day, traveling in a dusty trap, and it was not for some days that anyone gave a thought to sending for him in one of the deWitt carriages, with two black horses and silver harness, and coachmen.
He must return to the Dakotas in two days, he informed Cornelia tonight. And then it was his hope that he would be sent again to foreign fields. He spoke tranquilly; his life and work were at God’s disposal. Cornelia paused to admire a clump of narcissus and to bend to look into their fragile golden hearts. She said, “The only time I think there might be a possibility of God is in the spring.” She touched a red tulip gently as she went on. “An uncomfortable thought. God can quite ruin one’s private life if you permit Him to enter. And I’m very satisfied with my private life.”
Yes, thought Michael, you are. He conceded, with unhappy surprise, that there are actually people in the world who have never felt a need for God, or mourned at His absence in their lives, or were even aware of His presence.
“Well,” said Cornelia, examining a cluster of lilac bushes with spears of closed buds, “it is a great relief to all of us that DeWitt is getting better. I need not tell you, Michael, that the last report that he’ll never walk again has been terribly upsetting, particularly to his father. DeWitt is such an odd boy, but he is my favorite, though I don’t become as emotional as Allan does about his crippling. DeWitt will always find a way to dominate his world, even from a wheel chair.” She smiled down at Michael. “Do you think I am an unnatural mother because I don’t go around weeping and wailing?”
“I never judge anyone,” replied Michael. “No, you are not unnatural, Cornelia. You are just yourself. However, I don’t concur with the doctors. DeWitt will walk again, either on crutches or with canes. I’m sorry he doesn’t like me, but when I told him this morning that he would walk, he said he was glad there was someone around him who had some sense.”
Cornelia smiled. “He was always a boy with a lot of will. I suppose,” she added meditatively, “that something good comes out of every calamity. A foolish aphorism, I always thought. But Allan has recovered amazingly from his last nervous breakdown since DeWitt was taken ill and we returned home. I simply don’t understand him.”
They walked on. Michael was silent for so long that Cornelia was about to speak of something else. Then Michael said in a low voice, “Allan is the kind who is at his best in the most desperate crises, and when he is fighting something tangible.”
“Business takes an enormous amount of his time,” said Cornelia. She hesitated. “All those breakdowns, four of them in ten years, and dreadful! I never understood. I thought it was overwork. But they usually occurred when any crisis had long passed.”
Michael waited. He looked up at her with his calm brown eyes, so clear and so unreserved. Birds were lacing the darkening sky; their sweet calls and insistent shrilling filled the mountain silence. Now from the earth rose an almost overwhelming odor of passionate life. “Tell me,” said Michael, when Cornelia, with a movement of restlessness, was about to move away.
“I detest dramatization, emotionalism, stripping yourself or others naked and begging the world to look at your nakedness,” she said. “It—it is almost obscene. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I am embarrassed by—”
“By Allan,” said Michael, when she paused.
“I love him, believe me. And, though he would not agree, I understand him very well. We knew all about each other. I thought it was enough; why isn’t it enough, for God’s sake?”
“Perhaps what Allan attained was not his real aim,” said Michael. Cornelia turned on him with astonishment, her gray flannel skirt whirling about her, her red hair rising above her head like a fiery crest. Then she cried vehemently, and with hoarse anger, “Then what, in God’s name, is his real aim?”
“I’m afraid he doesn’t know what it is, consciously, and neither do I.”
Cornelia stood there against the sky, large and lusty, and Michael could see the uncertain hardness of her face. She began to tap her foot on the wet grass. Then she laughed shortly, and shook her head. “Nine months ago, when he was very ill, the doctor drugged him heavily, and he didn’t know where he was, or even what he was
. He began to talk to the doctor in the voice and words of a child. He said, ‘I am going to be a priest, Dada. I knew it this morning, after my First Communion.’ Michael, what is the matter? Have I said something … ?”
The brown of Michael’s face had paled to a luminous pallor. “Please,” he begged in a stifled voice. He moved off a few feet, and stood with his head bent. Cornelia approached him after a few moments and said anxiously, but trying for lightness, “Something changed his mind. Children get odd ideas, but discard them. There is nothing to be dramatic about, is there? As Allan grew up he wanted something else, apparently.”
“I am wondering what changed his mind; I am wondering what happened to him,” said Michael. He clasped his hands across his black-robed pudgy belly, and the knuckles whitened. Cornelia studied him narrowly.
There was no avenue to this robust and vital woman, so far as he was concerned. She lacked sympathy, sympathy in the real meaning of the word. Besides, there was an agony in Allan which would forever be beyond her capacity to comprehend. So he chose a more superficial explanation, which would be acceptable to her and which contained some truth.
“Let me put it this way, Cornelia. Most young men who attain sudden success, an overwhelming success, as Allan did years ago, inherited the means or position to attain it. They have had a background of fine schools, fine homes, money, leisure, other diversions, pleasure, and interests. Once attaining great power and position, they accept them naturally, for no real strain or striving had been attached to them.
“But those entrepreneurs like Allan had nothing in their backgrounds but poverty, almost satanic ambition and determination, and lust for power. Nothing was of any other interest; gracious society, recreation, the company of secure people, the pleasant joys of relaxation, travel, pleasure in sheer living—these had never been in their lives, and when these things entered they were not attuned to accepting them and enjoying them. They were even, to these men, an irritating waste of time.” Michael stopped, and sighed heavily. “And when their goal was obtained, they had only two choices before them: gaining even more power, world without end, or dying of frustration when they consciously, or unconsciously, realized that this was not what they had wanted at all, that it gave them no delight, and the world they had attained was empty of everything. They had narrowed their existence; like a projectile, they were trained on only one target.”